Specifying Hardware Requirements for a Virtual Appliance

InstallAnywhere 2021

Instead of offering different product editions (such as Basic, Deluxe, and ) of your virtual appliance with different sets of functionality for each edition, you may want to offer virtual appliances with varying sets of hardware requirements or compute capacity.

To specify the hardware requirements for a target hypervisor, use the Hardware subtab of the VM Configuration tab in the Build Appliances view on the Build page. The options that are listed on this subtab depend on which target hypervisor is selected on the Appliance Configuration tab in the Build Appliances view.

For a virtual appliance with a target hypervisor of VMware vSphere 5, you can specify basic hardware requirements such as number of virtual CPUs, number of virtual CDROMs, number of virtual Ethernet adapters, the default virtual hard disk size, and the default virtual RAM size. InstallAnywhere will create the various controllers—such as SCSI and IDE controllers—for your hard drives and CDROMs respectively. The network adapters are all set to default PCNET32 type.

When you are creating Amazon EC2 virtual appliances, you can use the Hardware subtab to help you choose the instance type to be associated with the Amazon instance, such as a small instance, high-CPU medium instance, or medium instance. The hardware requirements for each of these instance types is constantly being adjusted and updated by Amazon. For the most up-to-date information, see http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/.

To specify hardware requirements:

1. In the Advanced Designer, on the Build page, click Build Appliances. The Build Appliances view opens.
2. Click the Appliance Configuration tab.
3. In the Select Appliance Configuration list, select the appliance configuration whose hardware requirements you want to specify.
4. Click the VM Configuration tab.
5. For VMware vSphere appliances: In the Select VM Tier list, select the VM tier whose hardware you want to configure.
6. Click the Hardware subtab.
7. Specify the hardware requirements.

For information on each of the settings that you can configure, see Hardware Subtab.